Since the 1880s, U.S. cities have been burning municipal solid waste as a means of getting rid of trash. Many incinerators operating now use the heat from burning trash to produce steam that can generate electricity. Advocates of these “waste-to-energy” plants say that it is an environmentally friendly energy source. They have rebranded incinerators as ok for the environment this way. However, this pretty picture is far from the truth.
This method to mask incineration as renewable energy is completely misguided. Such facilities are serious polluters and undermine recycling. To make matters worse, the current industry is promoting a new process called co-incineration or co-firing. With this process, operators burn waste alongside traditional fossil fuels like coal in facilities such as cement kilns, coal-fired power plants and industrial boilers. Co-incineration is obviously not clean either.
Bottom line, the incineration industry is capitalizing on renewable energy but it is horrible for people and the environment! According to The Conversation, “there are 86 incinerators across 25 states burning about 29 million tons of garbage annually – about 12% of the total U.S. waste stream. They produced about 0.4% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2015 – a minuscule share. Classifying incineration as renewable energy creates new revenue streams for the industry because operators can take advantage of programs designed to promote clean power. More importantly, it gives them environmental credibility.”
No New News
The reality is, the government has known for a long time now that emissions typically associated with incineration include particulate matter, lead, mercury, and dioxins, but the laws regarding these facilities remain lenient. For example, back in 2011, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation found that although facilities burning waste in New York complied with existing law, they released up to 14 times more mercury, twice as much lead and four times as much cadmium per unit of energy than coal plants.
The Vulnerable Suffer
There is a well-established pattern of environmental injustice in the US in regards to the placement of incinerators. For instance, communities of color and Hispanic are far more likely to be housed next to sources of pollution, such as power plants, highways, landfills, and other industry, than their white counterparts.
Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former environmental justice official at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who departed the agency after two decades in 2017, said:
“Incinerators have historically played a significant role in the creation or expansion of environmental sacrifice zones in our most vulnerable communities, lowering housing values and increasing diseases such as cancer, asthma and other health impacts to those living in close proximity to the toxic emissions being released. Incinerators have never been just about public health, they have been about, race, power, justice, governance and poverty. The decision we make today based on 30-plus years of environmental justice experiences will say a lot about the evolution of decision-making in our country.”
Ali believes people in vulnerable communities should be serviced by renewable energy and zero-waste streams that eliminates the need for incinerators. They should not be subjected to cancers, asthma, and heart disease because of everyone’s garbage! KT Andresky, a campaign organizer with Breathe Free Detroit, said their “communities have lost neighbors to cancer and asthma.” On top of all that, some recent studies have even shown how air pollution is linked to dementia and adolescent psychotic experiences, among other things.
According to research by the Tishman Environment and Design Center at New York City’s New School, of the 73 incinerators across the US, 79% are located within three miles of low-income and minority neighborhoods. In total, 4.4 million people live within three miles of an incinerator in the US. Of this total, 1.6 million live close to the top 12 incinerators measured in terms of pollutant emissions across mercury, lead, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and carbon monoxide.
Attention Deflect
Another problem with waste incineration is that it deflects attention from more sustainable solutions, such as redesigning products for recyclability or eliminating toxic, hard-to-recycle plastics. Currently, only about one-third of municipal solid waste is recycled in the United States and the rates for some types of plastics are even lower. Burning municipal solid waste emits nearly as much carbon per unit of energy as coal, and almost twice as much as natural gas says the EPA.
The Conversation stated that “incineration is a false solution to climate change that diverts precious resources, time and attention from more systemic solutions, such as waste reduction and real renewable fuels like solar and wind. Whether it’s an incinerator, cement kiln or coal plant, if you put garbage into a system, you get garbage out.”
There Is Hope
As more and more knowledge is spreading – thanks to an escalating amount of scientific research being conducted that prove the harmful effects of pollution – we should begin to see a resistance against non-environmentally friendly conduct. An additional booster to public information that should help the cause is coming from data collecting agencies like WattTime, which is using a satellite to gather pollution information on every power plant in the world in real time and posting it on their website for everyone to see. It’s ideas like that which will empower the people to demand governments and big companies to get their act together before its too late!